azertyfun

I didn't play TW3 right on launch but CP77 was... fine, on PC. Played it day one, nothing game-breaking.

However four years later the open world still disappoints compared to the masterclass that was TW3. The world feels smaller, the driving sucks ass, and NC doesn't feel nearly as lively or polished as Novigrad (though it is gorgeous and I did have a great time).

Even two years later, CP2077 was a technical regression from TW3. Bugs aside, can CDPR really pull it together and improve upon TW3 and not repeat the mistakes of CP2077, despite having to learn entirely new engine? I wouldn't bet too much on it.

Don't think it is, I tried to geoguess it but the only "real" Delhaize near Leuven with those red bricks is in Heverlee but the surroundings don't match.

But honestly those apartment buildings could be in literally any city from Arlon to Oostende.

Alternative wording:

30% of the electorate is actively pro-trump, 30 % of the electorate is actively anti-trump, 40 % doesn't give enough of a shit either way to get off their couch and vote.

Alternative alternative wording:

70 % of the electorate is pro-trump or ambivalent.

See, it's very easy to speak for non-voters. That's why anyone with half a brain discards their opinion entirely. So we have to assume 52 % of American voters support Trump.

Liquidation auction efforts, logically, should pursue the option that pays out the most money.

To whom?

The money is going to Jones's victims. The victims seem fine getting less money if it means InfoWars goes to someone who will destroy the brand rather than some conservatives who will pump money into it to further destroy their lives.

Typical American "justice". Only first world country where the death penalty is in vigor because "this is what the victims would want", but when a plaintiff looks like they might actually get a small moral win against fascists suddenly the Law is a dispassionate machine.

The Algorithm has been A Thing long enough to have impacted young adults during their formative years.

At 25 I'm barely old enough that I entered adolescence just as "youtuber" became a career for many people (around 2012ish). The Algorithm has been part of it all my teens though I witnessed it becoming increasingly eldritch throughout and teaching its final untethered form in the second half of the 2010s. Today's 20 year olds never knew anything else as they were 13 when elsagate was in full swing.

TL;DR how are your knees grandpa?

The phonology of "moth" is just bad (not just subjectively but in a way that I'm sure linguists could pick apart). It's adjacent to "moist". That's the kind of name you give something you don't like, a name made to be spat out. Contrast to other monosyllabic names like "fly", a decidedly more despicable insect but with a much prettier name. Which one would be easier to use in a song?

Also I just checked and moths are butterflies, etymologically it's just that old Germanic peoples assigned a different name to the less colorful butterflies.

I didn't even know disliking moths was a thing until recently.

Guess why? In French they are called "night butterflies". It's just a nocturnal butterfly so of course it's brown, duh.

This feels like the Orca/Killer Whale debate again. Why do the English give such terrible names to animals like they're trying to give children nightmares?

Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.

Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don't gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.

Supervision doesn't have to be patronizing or demeaning. A 15 year-old isn't dumb anymore, merely ignorant and impulsive which does tend to make them shitheads but that's kind of a separate problem.

Most adults are shockingly bad at understanding and explaining their own thoughts and rationales, including to other adults. So when interacting with a teenager, they either throw their hands up or fall back on "shut up and do as I say" as one would with a 5 year-old.

That's where teens can be failed really badly by the adults around them because they are at an age where unlike children they are mostly/fully equipped to understand "adult" advice, and will not blindly follow orders anymore. But they also need way more advice, guidance and explanation than an actual adult. I think that's where the post is getting at. Don't forget that teens are kids, but don't treat them like they are subhuman or lacking in agency.

My gut feeling was that a standard accessibility protocol doesn't exist yet, but that a Wayland extension is probably the solution.

Looks like I was right: https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/

However that's a recent proof-of-concept, so nothing generally available at this stage. Details would have to be ironed out, changes upstreamed, the protocol extension accepted, and every graphics toolkit would have to be updated to support the protocol. Seems like a very worthy goal to pursue though and it's great to see funds allocated for a11y.

I don't know how that would work with XWayland apps, but given how clunky that gets with stuff like fractional scaling I wouldn't get my hopes up. The sooner we can native Wayland all the things, the better. X11 must die, regardless of the feeling of the graybeards on the matter.

I'm not a revolutionary and I disagree that the semantic difference is unimportant.

"The system must be destroyed" implies, assuming we're talking about national politics, at the very least a short period of very deep constitutional and institutional reform, but really refers to nothing less than civil war, violent revolution, and the systematic dismantlement of existing institutions from which proponents of such action generally assume that their preferred method of government will naturally emerge.

This is opposed to a belief that, flawed may they be, democratic institutions also act as safeguards against the tyranny of the majority as well as the tyranny of whoever has the most money/guns, and slow incremental change to these institutions is preferable to their dismantlement.

Of course everything in the world isn't so black and white. Nonetheless the existence of gray doesn't diminish the difference between black and white. "The system must be destroyed", by virtue of the violence it implies, is an extremist statement and different in nature to "the system must be fixed".

Oh you completely misunderstand the modern fascist playbook. Putin Erdogan Orban or Modi don't usually ban semi-obscure shows outright. They use their near complete control of all major media to ensure these shows never become a major cultural hit in the first place (by not funding nor platforming them). Cult classics aren't burned, their meaning is just subverted; Star Wars isn't a critique of fascism, it was always an allegory for the Righteous Traditionalists (the Jedi) working against The Woke (The Empire). No-one quite knows what Tolkien meant with Isengard, surely no allegory there, but I can tell you The Shire shows how good the tradwife life can be so get back to pumping out kids and churning butter missus!

Slight deviations are tolerated of course. Who cares if the urban elites have some woke media. As long as they keep to themselves, it's just convenient to keep the intellectuals distracted. Just don't make the mistake of making a nationwide cultural hit that questions the official narrative a bit too directly, because that's when you'll find yourself accidentally defenestrated.